Money, Honey

Okay, so only my life story for the past few months, and just a little bit of it.  I was working as a master planner for an architecture firm in Dallas when I got hit by layoffs.  Okay, so technically, I saw it coming - the layoffs 30 days before helped me with that little bit of future-gazing - and I wasn't that surprised, but it still felt like a punch in the gut.  I was the girl from school whose former classmates always wanted to know if my firm was hiring because I positively gushed about working.

For the past few months, I've been fruitlessly looking for work.  I have some health issues, so I'm not able to fall back on waiting tables or bartending like some of my compadres.  So now, instead of obsessing about getting the most square-footage and parking out of a smallish chunk of land, I obsess about: MONEY.  And how to keep it once I get it (thank you Texas Workforce Commission).  This means auditing my personal checking account, my Unemployment Insurance account, and my money-market account multiple times per day, regardless of whether or not I've spent any money from the accounts.  In past times, this was something I did maybe once per week, just to make sure I didn't overdraw the aforementioned checking acct.  Now, I'm always checking to see if:

1. My COBRA (health insurance for us unemployed folks) payment has been deducted

2. Transfers from one account to another are processing

3. My car insurance draft has been deducted yet

4. I have enough money to buy

And now I have something new to obsess about: MY STOCKS.  Some of the money I'm managing to save goes into a nice tidy money-market account.  But I didn't necessarily want to put ALL of it in there.  So.  I decided to buy some stock in a big international company.  For cheap.  I bought a whopping two shares of stock.  And I'll buy more next month.  And now, although I intend to keep it for YEARS (unless it shoots through the roof and makes me a 5000% return, which I doubt) and accumulate more, I keep checking its value online.  Yahoo Finance is like crack for me now.